"World’s wealth
belongs to few," The Toronto Globe headline proclaimed. "First wide-ranging
analysis of international distribution of riches finds ‘a lot of inequality.’"
According to the accompanying story, the study found that "1 percent of the
richest adults own 40 percent of total global wealth." Another story, this one
from The New York Times, says the top 1 percent of wage earners in the U.S. saw
their "share" of income go up 14 percent in 2005, to an average of about $1.1
million each.

My mind races; will
there be any global wealth left over for me to own? My sanity catches up. Wait a
minute, wealth is not a commodity to be bought or sold. It is simply a measure,
in this case of what a person actually owns. More importantly, the fact that the
guy next door has more wealth than I do does not mean that I cannot acquire
wealth myself.

The global study,
conducted under the auspices of the United Nations, considered as its measure of
wealth what many of us would call our net assets, the things we own after we
subtract what we owe. In so doing, the researchers found that the United States
is the richest country, having 37 percent of the world’s wealthiest 1 percent.
Interesting, but what does it mean?

To read the newspaper
accounts, one would think it means Americans have a disproportionate amount of
the world’s wealth. That once again, greedy Americans have more than their
share, and that the richest Americans have a disproportionate amount of that
share. But such a view portrays the wrong notion of wealth.

Wealth is not a
product or commodity. There is not some factory out there manufacturing wealth
that will someday run out. Wealth is not a service that ends when the shop
closes for the night. Wealth is simply a measure. Having more of it does not
mean your neighbor has less. Having more of it does not mean you took it from
someone else. It is instead a reflection of who we are; our talents, our
choices, our opportunities, how hard we have applied ourselves, and, often
overlooked, the economic system that underlies the nation in which we live. In
other words, unless fraud or some other nefarious scheme is in place, obtaining
wealth is not a zero-sum game.

The fact that there is
inequality in wealth should not surprise those in a free society. Lawrence W.
Reed, president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, points out that it is
a basic economic principle that equal people are not free and free people are
not equal. This point is easy to illustrate. Give $1,000 to every man woman and
child at 8 a.m. and by 5 p.m. the amount individuals have remaining will differ
radically. Some will have spent their money on a desired good or service, others
will have invested it and made even more money, and still others will have given
it away. This is simply the result of free people making independent choices.
Indeed, if everyone at the end of the day still had exactly $1,000, it is hard
to imagine that these people live in a free society. People are different, with
unique wants and needs that lead to various levels of wealth.

Government, too, plays
an important role. It is not surprising that the United States leads the world
in wealthy citizens. The founders of the United States predicated their view of
a nation not on a geographical place, but on the idea of freedom of the
individual. The system of government set forth in our Declaration of
Independence and Constitution is one that promotes individual choice and
freedom. Such a system, designed to allow individuals to decide for themselves
what to do with their time, effort and money, is what we call a free-market
economy.

History has shown, and
economists observed, that when nations pursue economic systems that rely on the
power of free individuals to make decisions about what to produce and consume,
prosperity results. This is in contrast to the centrally planned systems of
dictatorships, socialism or communism, where economies struggle for decades and
end in failure.

The question that
ought to be raised by the reports is not whether the people of the United States
are guilty of too much wealth, but rather what is it about the U.S. that has
fostered such economic prosperity and how can it be replicated. To Americans, it
should also bring to mind that we should be very cautious about moving further
toward government mandated choices and solutions.

There are legitimate
concerns that can be raised about the moral responsibilities of people of
wealth. But this is not a question of whether there is enough wealth in the
world or an issue of government concern. It is entirely possible for the rich to stay rich and at the same time for the poor to also become rich. Wealth is not a pie to be divided. In sum, your getting rich costs me nothing.

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Thomas W. Washburne is director of
labor policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and
educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in
whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are
properly cited.